Grant and his staff had charged up to the top of the bluff at Pittsburg Landing and started inland. They rode perhaps half a mile when they met W.H.L. Wallace, who was trying to support Prentiss in his crisis. From Wallace, Grant received further confirmation that the attack seemed to be the full force of the Confederate army. Grant dispatched Rawlins to hurry back to the landing and direct the quartermaster Capt. A. S. Baxter to hurry Tigress down to Crump’s Landing and tell the other Wallace—Lew Wallace—to bring his division to Pittsburg on the double.
Grant’s orders had been verbal, but when Rawlins reached the landing Baxter wanted them written out to eliminate any chance of mistake. The substance of the order was that Wallace would come up by the River Road—the shortest route, about five miles—and “form a line of battle at a right angle with the river and be governed by circumstances.” This should have been simple to accomplish, but it was not, and so has spawned acrimonious controversy down the years until the present day, as we shall see. In any event Lew Wallace that morning took the wrong road, and with it the critical weight of his 7,200-man infantry division was removed from the battle.
Meantime, Grant continued to visit his divisions, lending encouragement, hastening up ammunition and supplies, and “sending his aides flying over all parts of the field” with orders to commanders or to collect information. The fact that a lot of lead and iron was flying through the air did not seem to deter Grant in the least. Among his aides that morning was Capt. Douglas A. Putnam, a paymaster, who had come up on Tigress that morning and volunteered to assist Grant when he got to Pittsburg Landing. Riding after the general with Rawlins, Putnam began to notice the first signs of battle and, “in [his] inexperience,” asked Rawlins if the little pitter-patter he was hearing in the leaves was rain—“to which Rawlins tersely said, ‘No, those are bullets, Douglas.’ ”
According to Putnam Grant had, against his habit, donned his full major general’s uniform that day, “complete with buff sash, making him “very conspicuous,” causing Rawlins and McPherson—who was serving that day as chief of staff—“to remonstrate with him for so unnecessarily exposing himself,” but Grant brushed them off.
He visited Sherman in the bullet-pocked clearing of his old drill field near the peach orchard, and found him grimy, bloodstained, and just as feisty as ever, with his collar pulled around sideways, “so that the part that should have been in front rested under one of his ears,” Putnam said. It was a grim meeting of few words, with Grant asking questions and Sherman vowing to fight on.
The problem was that Sherman’s command simply wasn’t standing up to the Rebel assault. Pat Cleburne’s men were flooding into the ravines leading toward Shiloh church, and Sherman’s brigades were in danger of being cut off—especially McDowell’s men, who were guarding the far right end of the Federal line way out by the Owl Creek bridge. About 10 a.m. Sherman sent orders for the entire division to withdraw to a line farther north. When word of this got to McDowell, he rode out and ordered the brigade to fall back to the new line. As this order was passed down, the lieutenant colonel commanding McDowell’s old regiment, the Sixth Iowa, “about-faced the left wing and marched it back to the field fence, leaving the other four companies standing in line in the woods,” according to the regimental historian. Puzzled by this unusual maneuver, McDowell rode over to the regiment to find out what it meant. “It means, sir, that the colonel is drunk,” was the answer he got, whereupon McDowell had the colonel arrested and relieved of his sword.
Alcohol use on the battlefield was not limited to the Union army alone. Around the time of the Sixth Iowa incident, and just to their left, was a Rebel company in Bushrod Johnson’s brigade consisting of about 60 men from southern Illinois who had sided with the Confederacy. They were protecting Capt. Marshall T. Polk’s Rebel battery of six guns, which was shooting it out with a Yankee battery across the way.
The Illinois men were among a small but defiant group of Illinoisans from the “Egypt” area who identified with the grievances of the South. Known as the Southern Illinois Company, they served in the 15th Tennessee, in Johnson’s brigade, a part of General Polk’s corps.
During the battle that morning the firing became heavy and hot, and it appeared that Sherman’s people, led by Col. Joseph Cockerill’s 70th Ohio, were going to storm Polk’s battery and possibly capture it. After all other senior officers of the 15th Tennessee were shot down, Johnson told the captain of the Southern Illinois Company to take command and defend the guns, which he did, according to the regimental historian, despite the fact that “Brevet Lieutenant Harvey Hays, who was drunk, did little more than yell a litany of curses at the blue-clads.” The Rebel guns were successfully repositioned in a fierce fight that earned the Illinois Confederates their full “twelve minutes of fame,” or so it was maintained by witnesses at the Battle of Shiloh.
After Sherman, Grant next visited Prentiss, who was in the fight of his life in the center of the line, having been pushed back nearly a mile. Grant told him to hold his position “at all hazards,” and that he would send him reinforcements—meaning from Lew Wallace’s division—soon as it arrived. For better or worse, Prentiss took him to heart. Grant said the same thing to his other division commanders. Lew Wallace was now the army’s reserve, the only large-size unit not then already engaged. Grant insisted to everyone that Wallace was near at hand. His presence on the battlefield was critical, as Grant well knew; it could mean the difference between self-preservation and defeat.
By then it was midday and the Rebel attacks were at their most furious intensity. Nothing better illustrates the level of violence and desperation of the attacks—and the Union defense—than the trial of Colonel Camm of the 14th Illinois, whom we first met as he studied the face and the diary of the beautiful dead Rebel soldier at Fort Donelson.
By midmorning the first waves of the Confederate attack—Hardee’s corps and, soon after, Bragg’s—had crested and broken over the regiments of Prentiss and Sherman, whose divisions had been posted in the southernmost lines of the Union position. In so doing these Confederates had practically sacrificed themselves: The Sixth Tennessee, for instance, endured 70 percent casualties, but they had also taken a fearful toll on the Union defenders, who were falling back in almost as wretched a condition.
However, they were falling back on their second lines, which consisted of the camps of Major General McClernand and Brig. Gen. W.H.L. Wallace’s divisions, and also the division of Brigadier General Hurlbut, who was nearest the landing itself. Now they were being additionally swamped by the Confederate army’s second waves, consisting of Polk’s corps and Breckinridge’s reserve.
In his diary, Camm had written, “April 6th. Began with a bright beautiful morning. The trees were budding, the birds were singing, but none of us dreamed what a dark and bloody ending the day would have. It was a morning for lambs to gambol on. As we saw it last that evening, a great red globe of blood.”
The 14th Illinois was assigned to Hurlbut’s division but soon after the attack started Sherman asked for help from Hurlbut and McClernand, and Camm’s was one of the regiments sent south to plug a gap between Sherman and the hard-pressed Prentiss. Right away Camm “noticed something that I did not like.” Some of the junior officers, he said, were swapping their coats with shoulder straps and insignia for the coats of privates, and when one of them tried to involve Camm in the scheme he replied, “I am proud of my straps,” adding that he would need them in the confusion of battle and “I would die with them on if I have to die.” Thus said, Camm rode off toward the sound of the guns, “which had settled into a steady roar.”
For the remainder of the day we see in Camm’s regiment the difference between how men in desperate battle fight under resolute commanders, as opposed to what we have already seen of the 53rd Ohio, deserted by its colonel.
When Camm rode ahead to clear the road to the battle line so the regiment could pass, he met a wagon carrying, among other baggage, a wounded soldier whose leg had be
en blown off below the knee. “He stuck the stump, with the shattered bone almost sticking out into my face,” Camm said, and in a strong voice he cried above the din, “Give ’em hell for that, Colonel!”
“The earth was shaking now,” Camm said, “and above the cannon and rifle fire we could hear the treble of the rebel yell as the storm came towards us.” When they came to the Review Field, where they used to drill, “the bullets began to whiz by.” Camm was riding with the regimental chaplain and “admonished him to go to the rear and prepare to succor the wounded; at the same time, “he said, “I handed him my pocket book, which contained several hundred dollars, asking him to send it to my father should I be killed.”
The regiment went into the line south of the Purdy road, facing southwest with a battery of five rifled guns and an old brass howitzer. They were supporting an Ohio regiment and so were told to lie down and wait. Camm noticed that one of his color bearers, a boy named Fletcher Ebey, was kneeling, trying to get a look around, and before Camm could order him down a bullet through the heart “laid him down dead, and bleeding on his flag.” Moments later, Camm said, a lieutenant named Opitz was sitting on a stump, messing with the tobacco in his pipe, when a bullet “struck him in the end of the nose and cut the top of an ear off as it came out. I could see the Jonnies running from tree to tree and popping away at us as they came. They had driven everything before them so far, and seemed to think they could drive us, too.
“The battery was belching like a volcano, but only seemed to attract the fire of the enemy’s guns and the rush of heavy shot and head-splitting crack of bursting shell all about us were adding to the increasing roar.” Camm heard a bugle and saw the Confederates ahead massing for a charge, and also a tall Union artillery sergeant double-shot the brass cannon. The regiment was ordered forward but did not fire until the Confederates were in close range.
“What followed,” Camm said, “no man could well describe, until the Rebels were repulsed. I saw our handsome orderly of company ‘G’ fall with blood spurting from both temples. Regimental Color Sergeant John E. Kirkman rolled the body of his dead comrade off the national colors and rose with both flags in his hands, and as he did so a shot passed through the folds of the Stars and Stripes, cutting a gap in the staff and then passing through Kirkman’s cap and grazing his head.
“The enemy were checked but were very stubborn, and we murdered each other down at close range,” Camm wrote. “Our brigade commander rode down the line and I asked him to turn us loose with the bayonet. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘you would lose every man.’
“My horse was struck behind the saddle and lunged among the men, so I let him go; I tried to get the men to charge but between us [and the Rebels] was a struggling mass of wild and wounded battery horses, many of them harnessed to the dead, and I could not get them started. But I got far enough forward to see a Confederate soldier trying to lead his men into our line. I covered him with my pistol but he was behaving so bravely that I hesitated firing.
“He pointed me out to a black-bearded soldier on his left,” Camm continued, “and as his piece covered me, a quiet and not unpleasant feeling came over me, and I let the point of my saber drop to the ground. I seemed to hear the bullet hiss.” Just then somebody shot the Rebel officer and, moments later, the soldier with the black beard. Camm, who had dismounted, was hit in the thigh by a shot that glanced off his saber. Walking back across the Union line he encountered two officers, a captain and a lieutenant, who had been shot. “Blood was running through Sibley’s fingers,” Camm said, “and Simpson’s hand was mangled.
“New troops seemed to have come against us. The 15th [Illinois] on our right with Ellis and Goddard both killed, gave way. Our right wing followed. [Colonel] Hall rushed up with orders—‘back, back.’ ” The regiment backed up about a hundred paces and re-formed on the Purdy road. Among the last men to get in line was a sergeant, “well-dressed, almost a dandy. Tears were running over his cheeks and he was exhorting his comrades to die upon the line, rather than to break again.”
At that point there was a lull in the battle, “but before our muskets could cool,” Camm wrote, “the enemy came on again, and the fight became fiercer than ever.” A young man named Noble Stout, “whom the men used to make sport of because of his innocent simplicity,” staggered up to Camm, crying, “Oh, Colonel, I’m shot.” He had been hit in the stomach. Camm led him behind a fallen tree but afterward noticed “the pale face, the closed eyes, the livid parted lips, and supposed him dead. But,” he added, “a burial party tells me they could not find the body.”
A man came up with a rifle whose stock had been shot away, saying, “That is the fourth gun smashed in my hand. What shall I do?” Camm pointed to a gun on the ground and the man threw down his broken weapon and “was soon blazing away. Nearby stood Hankins, blood spouting from his breast at every inspiration,” said Camm. “He loaded and fired till a shot struck him in the chin and went through the neck killing him.
“Up the road through a rift in the smoke I saw a confederate officer mounted in front of their colors waving a bright sword, leading his men on, but before the smoke hid them again, officer, horse, and colors all went down,” blown apart by a battery of heavy guns in Camm’s rear. Outflanked again, Camm’s regiment again gave ground, with such officers as remained doing all they could to rally the men. Camm grabbed a color bearer and led him on the run to a ravine in the rear where he began to shout for the fleeing men to “rally on the colors.”
This many of them did, and in a short time “the remnant of our regiment was ready for our foes,” said Colonel Camm. They had gone into the battle at 10:30 a.m., and now, at straight-up noon, there was only the glaring sun overhead to remind them that they were not already dead and rotting.
1 A question arises about why Grant took so much time to get to the battlefield. But traveling by horseback would have been problematic; Grant would have had to steam up to Crump’s Landing, where there was still six miles of tricky terrain to cross—and not knowing where the Rebels were. And if he had chosen to travel on the Savannah side of the river, there would be nine miles of swamp to navigate. The steamer was safer and surer.
2 Once loaded, most Civil War–era rifles and muskets could not easily be unloaded, and the quickest method of disarming them was to fire them off.
CHAPTER 11
LIKE SHOOTING INTO A FLOCK OF SHEEP
AS THE CONFEDERATES DROVE GRANT’S ARMY northward, what remained of the civilian population of Pittsburg Landing made do as best they could while the drama unfolded. Shortly before the battle nine-year-old Elsie Duncan had been “sitting outside beneath a blooming hollyhock bush watching the bees on flowers.” The night before the battle, as she tells it, “Mother said that we would have to trust in the Lord to take care of us. Margie [a servant] brought a cat into the room. Mother prayed and she and Margie sang some songs. Then we all went to bed and left everything to the Lord.
“Next morning,” Elsie continued, “when I waked and saw my mother sitting there by the fire with the baby in her lap, it seemed that she was sitting there by the bed when we went to sleep and still sitting there when we got up. I always felt safe when I was with my beautiful mother—with her hazel eyes and black hair, rosy cheeks and lady-like ways. She had the most beautiful white hands I ever saw.
“And then I jumped out of bed and said ‘Oh Mother, what is that noise!’ With a beating heart I rushed to her side. ‘Is that the fighting?’ I was frightened and I said, ‘Oh mother, do you think that [her brothers and half brothers] Jim and Joe and [illegible] are there?’ She said ‘I’m afraid they are.’ Father, being a chaplain,” Elsie wrote, “we knew he would not be in the battle. But when I heard the cannon roar and the guns popping and the horses screaming it seemed as if everything was lost.”
Elsie left the house for a short while—apparently to seek a safer shelter—for when she returned, she said, “I saw that my father [a local preacher and Confederate army chaplain] had come home. He
was bending over the bed and mother was tearing a cloth into strips. I went into the room and saw a rebel soldier boy with his hip all shot up. I gave one look and saw that it was one of our neighbor’s boys. I could not bear to look at him. When they were through with him his folks came and took him home.”
Just where on the battlefield Elsie was located is hard to determine, since the family apparently had several dwellings in the vicinity. Maps show that “Duncan Field” was located just north of the Hamburg-Purdy road near the intersection of the Main Corinth Road, which would have put it close to where Colonel Camm and his 14th Illinois were having the fight of their lives with the men of Hardee’s corps, including Pat Cleburne’s survivors and the brigade of A. P. Stewart. Reports say that “Cleburne joined Stewart at 12 noon in an attack upon positions at Duncan House, where some of Cleburne’s men were taken prisoners by the Seventh Illinois.” Later, the house was in the midst of the Hornet’s Nest fighting.
One shudders to think that a family of civilians was actually in the middle of the kind of fighting that characterized that part of the field, but according to Elsie, wherever it was she called “home” that day saw something of the battle.
“The fighting began at our gate, just past the house,” she wrote. “As the battle raged it got further away leaving dead men and horses behind. My father and other old men were behind the lines helping all they could. I went into one house where they had taken wounded and dead men. The floor was covered with blood. As I went back I saw a woman screaming and wringing her hands and mother was trying to quiet her. She could not do anything with her. She said that she had two sons in that battle—one on each side fighting against each other.”1